Working Too Much Is Stupid

Why is this news? Why do folks think that working gobs and gobs of hours, as
software developers, leads to better software, faster?

Sure, for something repetitive and methodological like bricklaying, you can
crank up the hours worked dial and see the wall getting built faster. And,
sure, there’ll be small bugs here and there (sloppiness as the worker gets
tired, etc.) but generally nothing that will materially affect the structural
integrity of the wall.

Pretty soon, however, the bugs are not small, easily cleaned up after ones,
but those that will cause you to go massively in debt. These kinds of wrong
architectural decisions when uncovered days/weeks/months later will bring
the whole project to a halt while the extent of the damage is estimated and
then repaired.

It kinda looks something like this (completely made up but feels approximately correct):

That’s why one metric I have software developers track per week is whether
or not they feel they are on a sustainable pace. Hours are a reasonable
approximation of sustainable pace (e.g. on average, don’t work much more
than 40 hrs/week) but not sufficient. Frequent check-ins are crucial to establish
what “sustainable pace” means for each individual software developer.

Given that we also follow the “Results Only Work Environment”
total number of hours worked doesn’t really mean anything anyway. With ROWE, you
work wherever you want, whenever you want. Every meeting is optional.